


Around Some Corner I Can Sense A Resting Place

by adventurepants



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s04e09 Forest of the Dead, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-23
Updated: 2011-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-24 21:52:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adventurepants/pseuds/adventurepants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's angry with him sometimes, angry at the Doctor for deciding on this fate for her.  But if not this, what would there be?  She'd never given much thought to the afterlife, and maybe a natural one would be no better.  But it's strange to be confined here, when not even prison had been able to hold her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Around Some Corner I Can Sense A Resting Place

River Song never quite pictured herself becoming a mother, but there she is, all set to become mother to three children who will never grow up.

None of them have ever been parents, River is no better equipped to deal with the situation than the others, but Charlotte likes her. Charlotte chooses her.

Ella and Joshua are more of a surprise. It seems odd that their programs would still be running, but they remain, and they can't be ignored.

“They're not real children, they're just computer programs,” Proper Dave says, not long after River's arrival. “Can't we just... delete them?”

“No!” Charlotte shouts, stepping in front of him and puffing her chest out. “I won't!”

“They're as real as you or I, Dave,” River says, holding her hands out to them. “Come to me, children. It's all right.” They press themselves against her sides, confused and anxious.

“What happened?” Ella asks. “Where did everyone go? Where's... where's...” She trails off, like she can't remember who she should be asking for.

“It's all right,” River tells them, arms around their shoulders. “You're okay. Isn't that right, Cal,” she says, looking at Charlotte, who nods and joins them.

“Let's go home, River.”

*

Ella and Joshua start calling her “Mummy” almost immediately, and River is surprised, but decides it must be in their programming, to accept any caretaker as their parent.

“But you must stop thinking of them as programs,” Charlotte tells her. “They're like us. You said so yourself.”

“You're very smart, Charlotte,” River tells her.

She answers, simply, “I've lived a long time.”

Charlotte calls her River, mostly. It's been a long time since she's had a mum, and the word is no longer familiar to her. She saves it up, uses it sparingly. On one notable occasion, she comes down the stairs for breakfast and greets River with “Good morning, Melody.”

River freezes in place for just a moment, stunned, before turning around and smiling. “Good morning, Cal.”

Ella and Joshua have trouble remembering Donna. Some of the data was lost when their parents were transferred out. They ask about her sometimes, though. “Mummy, what happened to... what happened to that woman? The nice one, with red hair?”

They're just children, and River can't bear to break their hearts, so she lies. If there's one thing River Song does flawlessly, it's lie. “Oh, safe and sound. Traveling the universe with her best friend. Don't you worry about her.”

Sometimes she'll catch herself wondering what the Doctor's doing right then, though she knows it's a silly question. He is a time traveler, and he is everywhere, at every time, doing everything. But she's been there for a few months, and if she chooses to measure his timeline against her own (a strange notion, as she'd never been able to before,) he has just lost Donna, and he's alone.

If she continues, if she plots out his days as they follow from her death, everything she knows of him will happen in the right order. He will die, he will regenerate, he will meet her mother. The angels will weep, the Pandorica will open. They will share his first kiss and her last. She will be born.

She misses him sometimes more than she believes she will endure, but she carries on. She is brave for her children. They are strong for her too, in their way.

The twins are normal. Remarkable in a thousand ways, as children are to their mothers, but normal. Charlotte is a bit different. She has the emotions of a child but the wisdom of someone much older, and in many ways is more of a partner, a companion, than a daughter. She's a great comfort to River.

“It's all right to be sad,” Charlotte tells her, because she always seems to know. She sits on River's lap, rests her head against River's heart. “You've lost things.”

“What did you lose, Mummy?” Joshua comes into the room, trailed by Ella who is carrying a stuffed rabbit by its ear.

“Nothing for you to worry about, sweetheart.”

“You always say that,” Ella says, swinging her rabbit a bit.

“I always mean it.”

“We lost something too, but we don't remember what,” Joshua says. He comes to stand beside the chair where River sits with Charlotte. “When you close your eyes,” he says, reaching out to place his fingers on River's cheek, “do we stop?”

“Stop what?” River asks, and she's used to it now, the way the children ask strange questions out of nowhere, or jump from one subject to the next with no transition.

“Stop being.”

River closes her eyes and places her hand over Joshua's. “Still there?”

“Yes,” he says, sounding relieved. “I'm here, Mummy.”

“Me too. I'm still here too,” says Ella.

“There's more room now,” Charlotte offers as an explanation. “Without all the people from the library.”

River understands, then, what Joshua meant. “Nobody has to stop, now,” she tells her children. “We all go on together.”

*

She tells them stories at bedtime, grand adventures, every one of them starring the Doctor.

“He's real, isn't he?” Ella asks. “He's not just a story.”

River never answers her.

She's angry with him sometimes, angry at the Doctor for deciding on this fate for her. But if not this, what would there be? She'd never given much thought to the afterlife, and maybe a natural one would be no better. But it's strange to be confined here, when not even prison had been able to hold her.

She remembers those long years in sleepy Leadworth, and this isn't so different—a family to anchor her. But she'd always known it would come to an end, back then, where here the days stretched out to eternity.

“Do you ever wish they had let you die, instead?” she asks Charlotte. It's late—even comprised of data, there are some nights they just can't sleep. So they drink tea in the kitchen together, talking in low voices, waiting out the night.

Charlotte takes River's hand and shows her what she still can't put into words. River sees, in her mind, Charlotte's hospital bed. Charlotte pale and dying, her parents crying at the side of her bed. Her brother and sister huddled together in the corner.

River wipes a tear away hastily, as Charlotte tries to explain. “It didn't matter so much what I wanted. I wouldn't be sick anymore, either way. I wouldn't hurt. But in here my family would know for sure I was okay. If he had let you die, he wouldn't know.”

She remembers her parents when she'd brought them home from Demon's Run. Rory, quiet and sad, who kept reaching as if to touch her and then pulling away. Amy, who held her hand so tightly it hurt.

“You can tell us where you are, and we'll go get you. We'll rescue you,” Amy said, wild-eyed, frantic with the loss of her child, and River had wanted to tell her _all right, let's go._

But she didn't. “I can't. I'm sorry, Amy, but I can't.”

“Why not?” her mother demanded.

“Because it didn't happen that way.”

“Time can be rewritten,” Rory said, hand on Amy's back to steady her. He seemed angry with her, almost. How dare she show up and not help them, how dare she bring them back here. A father's disappointment burns, no matter your age.

“Not this,” she told them.

“Please,” Amy begged, voice steady but pained, and River could only hold her, repeating her apology, holding her father's gaze over her mother's shoulder.

“Yes,” River tells Cal, reaching out to brush the girl's hair away from her face. “It's awful not to know.”

*

She sends Ella and Joshua to school for a year, but after the passage of their first summer decides that they don't have to go anymore. She admits to Cal that she doesn't know what to do with children who don't get older.

“We can make them grow,” Charlotte tells her, as if it should have been obvious. “We can grow lots of things.”

So the twins have a birthday, and River sends them back to school and starts marking their heights in the doorway to their bedroom. They're growing—and so is the blue box in the backyard, building rooms inside itself, becoming so much larger than the sum of its parts.

River checks on it sometimes. It won't let her in yet, but when she places her hands on its sides she can feel it humming. Charlotte beams, pleased with herself. “She'll be ready soon.”

“But it's not really her,” River says, though she rests her forehead against the wood and imagines, just for a moment. “The TARDIS is alive, she has a soul... this isn't real.”

“Your memories of her are real. She's real in that way. She's real the way we are.”

River closes her eyes and sees a familiar face she's never been able to explain, sees wild hair and tattered dress and eyes as old as the universe, and the TARDIS hums louder under her hands and yes, it feels as real as she remembers. She wonders, then, if she couldn't just build a Doctor out of memories. But that's crossing a line, and she knows she'll never do it.

She has brunch with Miss Evangelista the next day—she finds herself having a lot of brunches lately, because when you have eternity laid out before you, you've got to do something to fill the hours. Often, the something is brunch.

Lilly's face has been fixed and her IQ put mostly back to normal, but she remembers being ugly and smart. It's changed her, some.

“It seems like so long ago,” she tells River. “Like another life.”

They watch the children play in the back yard from the veranda at River's large house, and River smiles. “It _was_ another life.”

“You know what I mean,” Lilly says, and sighs.

River laughs, not unkindly. “Yes, I do.” She remembers how a new body was like starting over, how she felt immediately as if her old one had left her years ago.

“It's like... it's like there are things in my head that I can almost get to. Strings of numbers, ones and zeros. I can remember understanding things that I don't understand anymore, and every day it gets further away. What will it be like when we've been here a hundred years? What will it be like to be here forever?”

She's scared, River realizes. This isn't Heaven, and it isn't perfect, nor is it what any of them had planned. “I don't know. I don't know what it will be like. But this isn't a prison, and you won't be alone.”

Lilly looks like she might cry, but suddenly Charlotte is calling from the yard, drawing River's attention away.

“River! Mum!” She bounces on her feet, too excited to decide which name to use. “ _Melody!_ ” she finally settles on. “The doors are open!”

“Oh, Lilly” River says, careful not to let her voice betray her. “You've come on a good day.”

 _It's not really the TARDIS,_ she tries to tell herself as they rush out to where the children are hovering just outside the open doors. _It's not her._

Ella has become, in the past year, braver and louder and bossier than her brother (has grown, as River understands it, to be more like her first mother.) She bounds into the TARDIS before River and Lilly reach them. River almost tells her to stop, to wait for her, but the TARDIS is safe—it's the safest place she's ever known, though the places she took them might not have been—and she lets her go.

Joshua hangs back for a moment, but when Ella isn't scolded he decides it's safe to follow her. Cal waits.

“Mum,” she says, almost breathless, and she's never called River “mum” twice in such rapid succession. She throws her arms around River in a quick hug and then starts jumping in place again. “She's ready!”

River can hear the twins laughing inside, and when she peeks in, oh, it looks exactly right. She can't help herself, she's inside and at the controls in a second, reaching for them gingerly. Everything feels the same. It feels like his TARDIS (her TARDIS, their TARDIS.) Her hand rests lightly on a lever whose function she is suddenly too dazed to recall, but which she knows belongs exactly where it is. Every inch, every detail is perfect. She doesn't notice Charlotte standing beside her until she places her hand over River's, looking up at her hopefully.

“It's right, isn't it? We did it right?”

“Oh, Cal.” She smiles down at her daughter. “Yes. Should have taken us thousands of years to grow it, but beyond that...”

It's not the same TARDIS, she tries again to remember. It's a computer program. But she's not the same River, and this isn't the same reality, and maybe it's not so wrong to piece together bits of the life she had known. To give herself things that would make her happy. That's what he wanted, wasn't it?

Lilly makes a small, surprised noise in the doorway, having finally decided to follow them in. She's white as a sheet, and River knows what's coming. “But it's...”

“Yes?”

“Professor Song, it's bigger on the inside!” She hasn't addressed River so formally in months, but in her shock she seems to have forgotten.

Cal giggles, and River just smirks, as the twins run around the console, delightedly pressing buttons which refuse to respond to their inexperience.

“Of course it is!” River turns to Charlotte again. “Now, where shall we go? I suppose it'll have to be somewhere I know, won't it?”

“Well... not really,” Charlotte says, that pleased, proud look on her face again. “The library, remember? We have access to every book ever written. We can go anywhere.”

“You're not—you're not going now, are you?” Lilly is still half-frozen just inside the doors, wide eyes trying to make sense of her surroundings.

“Whatever would make us wait? Don't you want to come?” River raises an eyebrow playfully and pulls a few levers, feeling the TARDIS come to life under her hands. Flying is still as natural to her as breathing. She'll teach her children, she thinks. They'll fly together.

“But I can't—you can't—you can't just fly off into space at a moment's notice! And the children have school tomorrow.”

“It's a time machine,” Charlotte explains patiently. “We'll be back before anyone even knows we've gone.”

“Please come!” Joshua pleads. The children have always been fond of Lilly—she's their favorite adult after River (and sometimes, when they've been naughty and their mother has dared to punish them, she's their favorite adult, period.)

“But where are we going?” The doors close with a clatter right behind her and she jumps. Ella laughs.

“Don't know yet,” River answers. “That's half the fun.”

Lilly continues stammering her excuses, but River has stopped listening as she flips switches and adjusts settings. “Somewhere safe, please” she murmurs, low enough that only the TARDIS, and probably Charlotte, can hear. “We have to look after the children.”

She thinks about it for a moment, and then leaves the brakes on. She doesn't mind the noise so much anymore.

*

River's not sure how, but there are parts of the TARDIS, the new one, that can't have come from her memories, that she and Charlotte hadn't programmed in. Rooms she's never seen before (because even in all her time running she'd still never managed to learn them all.) Nothing about them rings false, but she can't explain how they exist.

The shock of Charlotte knowing things she shouldn't has long since worn off, so it's not much of a surprise when she shrugs and says, unconcernedly, “You were conceived in the TARDIS. There's part of her in you. You put those things in without knowing about it.”

So River sits in front of the console alone, stroking bits of it the way she used to make fun of the Doctor for doing. “It's really you, isn't it?” she asks, and if she's still and quiet and really listens, she can hear the answer: _yes._

She takes her friends on adventures, and it's wonderful and strange, a TARDIS full of people. They are game for anything, her little band of explorers, and her children never tire of traveling, though sometimes Lilly clucks her tongue and reminds them that the twins are missing school. River always tells her, assertively, that school is always right where they left it. This is her afterlife and there's no reason to be strict. They have forever.

Once Lilly gets past the curiosity of the TARDIS interior, of the mind-boggling nature of time travel, she relaxes a bit. She starts to have fun, she starts to become brave, she doesn't dare say she'll stay behind when River calls to tell her they're going on a trip. But once in a while she seems nervous, filled with dread. Once in a while she is so, so cautious.

They land inside a building by accident once, in a dark hallway. Lilly grabs River's wrist tightly when everyone else has filed gamely outside. “No,” she says in a small, shaky voice. “I can't.”

Nobody's forgotten what happened to Lilly the last time she stepped into a dark passage alone, and so River lets Lilly hold onto her, lets her know that she will not be left. “It's all right. It's safe.”

“You can't know that. We can't know everything. Even dead, we can't know everything.” She wipes tears from her face roughly with her free hand. “I can still remember what it felt like to die and I don't want to feel that ever again.”

River has her children with her and she'd never put them in danger, but Lilly knows that already, so River tries something else. “Do you know what happens if you die in here?”

Lilly shakes her head.

“You don't feel any pain. You don't feel any fear. You wake up safe in your bed and everything is just the same as it was. Everything is just the same as it will ever be. You are safe. You are here to be kept safe.”

Anita pokes her head inside, then, and if she notices Lilly's watery eyes she doesn't let on. “You coming?”

And then Ella's little voice from down the hall: “I found the lights!”

Lilly loosens her hold on River, and after a moment releases her completely. “Yes. Let's go.”

*

It's been six years when the message comes. The twins are eleven now, older than Charlotte will ever be physically. River's not sure what age they'll reach before they stop, but finds that she likes it, the best of two worlds: two children who she can watch grow and change and learn, and one who will stay her little girl forever.

“Mum!” Joshua calls out from the living room. “Come look at something!”

River means to ask him to keep his voice down indoors, and to say please when he's demanding something of her, but there's an urgency in his tone that makes her forget. He meets her in the doorway, looking only slightly concerned as he tells her, “There's two people in the telly, asking for you.”

Joshua is used to the unusual, having grown up inside a computer, traveling through fabricated time and space with his family, and so he is not, perhaps, as rattled as another eleven year old boy might be. River looks over his shoulder at the television, and her chest tightens immediately. It's her parents, tired and sad and hopeful.

“Why don't you go and see what your sisters are doing,” she tells her son, in a voice that suddenly doesn't sound like her own.

“Mum,” he starts, but River interrupts him.

“Please do as I say, Joshua.”

He swallows his protests, because he's a good boy and knows in this moment that his mother won't tolerate a fight. He looks back as he's leaving and she promises him, “I'll explain it to you later.”

River sinks to her knees in front of the television. “Hello.”

They're as old as she's ever seen them, but no older- so he's got the timing right, for once. Maybe they haven't had much time to worry why she hasn't popped in to see them in a while. Amy's eyes are red. She puts her hand up to the screen, palm flat against it, reaching for something she can never touch. “River.”

And suddenly River realizes that they can't be there, they can't be speaking to her from the Library. “You have to get out. The Vashta Nerada-”

“The Doctor's made a deal with them,” Rory says. “We get to say goodbye to you... and he doesn't destroy them.”

“He says you died to save him,” Amy says, voice tight and bitter.

River nods. “Yes.” She'd given all her lives for the Doctor, and she'd do it again if she could. She'd do it as many times as he needed it.

“He says if you hadn't done it, he'd have died before I met him. You would've been born a normal little girl on Earth, and no one would have taken you away from us.”

“That's true,” River says, and she doesn't like to think of it, of some alternate timeline where he gives his life and rewrites her own. Where the universe grows dark for lack of this man, and she never sees the stars that her mother believed in. He has made mistakes, caused pain, but he is good above all else. She was right to save him.

“You shouldn't have done it,” Amy says.

River puts her hand up to the screen, against her mother's. There's no point in saying that this is the way it had to be, that she would not have this rewritten, that the Doctor means more to the universe than she did. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I left you again.”

Amy's crying now, and they don't move their hands. It feels almost as if there's not an impossible distance separating them. “I knew we'd never get you back as a baby. But I thought we'd have more time.”

“I thought I would, too. I thought I might just live forever, if I was clever enough.” No one runs with the Doctor forever, and she should have known. She should have known by the way he held onto her sometimes that he knew one day it would be over.

“River,” Rory says. “Are you all right? Are you happy in there?”

“Oh, I'm all right, Father Dear. We've grown a TARDIS, you know. I can go anywhere.”

“Anywhere but back here,” Amy says.

River nods. “Anywhere but there.”

“Oh!” Rory says, remembering something. “Who was the kid?”

River smiles, and here is something good she can show them. Here is something to prove that the Doctor's given her a gift. “Would you like to meet your grandchildren?”

Rory blinks. “You had babies in there?”

“Inherited them, more like.” She rises from the floor. “I'll go get them. You wait here.”

When she comes back downstairs, trailed by her children, she stops short, drawing in a quick breath, because oh, she wasn't ready for this. Framed in the television, next to her parents, is the Doctor. She'd known he was there somewhere, would have to be, but hadn't asked for him. She didn't know if she could stand it.

Charlotte runs to the television, grinning. “Hello, Doctor!” she says, recognizing him instantly despite having met him in a different body.

“Charlotte Lux!” he says, absolutely thrilled. “Look at you! You've been taking care of River, I see. I hope you haven't been too strict.”

“Only sometimes,” she answers. “Usually she's good.”

“Now that I don't believe,” the Doctor says, as Joshua looks from the strangers on the screen to his mother's unreadable face.

“That's the Doctor? From your stories?”

Ella moves to sit down next to her sister. “Bit skinny, isn't he?” she says loudly, before addressing him directly. “Hello, Spaceman.”

Something passes over his face, full of both love and desperate, aching sadness, too quickly for anyone but River to notice. “Ella and Joshua Noble,” she says, hand on Joshua's shoulder as she guides them over to where the girls are sitting. “And Charlotte, my oldest.”

Charlotte scoots over to make room, and River kneels down again between her and Ella. Joshua sits next to his twin, casting a curious glance at River.

“These are my parents, Amy and Rory. And this,” River says, meeting his eyes finally, “is the Doctor.”

“Hello, River.”

It's been a long time since she's seen his eyes quite so full with her. “Hello,” she says, feeling lovestruck and silly.

“How long has it been for you?” he asks.

“Six years. And you're very rude, you know. I said goodbye to you already, and now I've got to do it all over again.”

“Oh, it's never goodbye with you and me,” he says, but it's a lie and they both know it. This is the last time she'll ever see him.

“I thought I'd have forever with you. You knew I never would.”

“Spoilers,” he says, and she laughs, the unexpected sound bubbling up out of her throat, genuine and happy.

“You've still got time, you know. This isn't the last time you see me.”

“But it's the last time we see you,” Rory says.

River nods. “I'm afraid it is.” She doesn't have a body to go back to on the other side, and she's a mother now, too- she would never choose to leave her children.

Amy has stopped crying and put on a brave face. “It's all right. We got one last time.”

Vaguely, River is aware of Charlotte's small fingers threading through her own. “Please don't worry about River. I promise she's okay. She's happy.”

“And she's a good mum,” Joshua adds. “Probably the best.”

“Good,” the Doctor says. “You three behave for her.” The screen goes fuzzy for a moment, and when it rights itself the Doctor's frowning, pointing his sonic screwdriver at something they can't see. “We're losing the connection.”

“No,” Amy says, and raises her hand to the screen again. “No, I'm not ready.”

“I'm sorry,” the Doctor tells them, his voice heavy and guilty in a way that has always made her chest feel tight. “This is it.”

“I love you,” River says to them against the lump in her throat.

“And you are loved, River Song,” the Doctor says as their faces blur again and then disappear completely. The cartoon Joshua had been watching takes their place, loud and bright and incongruous.

River is still and silent, staring ahead as Ella reaches forward slowly to turn the television off. Only then does she cry, bowing her head so that her hair falls around her face.

The four of them sleep in the TARDIS that night. River feels the hum underneath her skin, telling her she is not alone.


End file.
